Tonight's featured Roustabout! bands, Telograph and Jimi Jive, both originally played under different names -- but the similarities between the two groups end there.

Andy Boliek, singer and guitarist of Telograph, said the group has only been going by its current name for a little more than two years now.

"We had three shows as Walken -- as in Christopher," Boliek said. "We booked a show and picked that name. We had to switch names because none of us liked it."

Including Boliek, Telograph currently has four regular members -- Gary On on bass, Arash Ardalan on drums and the "multi-instrumentalist" JB Whittenburg.

Whittenburg plays both keyboard and guitar, Boliek said.

He is the man who fills in with whatever sound Telograph needs for a particular song.

Roustabout! promoter Jesse Ruegg said Telograph has an atmospheric sound.

"They have a big sound that you hear from a band like U2 or The Doves," Ruegg said. Ruegg picked Telograph to play tonight's show based on a demo. He has never heard the group live before, and he said that he is excited to see how Telograph performs on stage.

"You never know if the sound on the record will translate to live energy," Ruegg said.

Boliek's opinion of his band music matches Ruegg's view.

"Our music has an atmospheric quality to it," Boliek said. "It's not mopey music. It's kind of positive; it's kind of rhythmic. We're not trying to do the whole New Wave thing that was big two years ago."

As for the group's live sound matching that of its recordings, Boliek said he and his bandmates are "secretly looking for a fifth member."

Telograph's biggest show to date has been at the Patriot Center in Fairfax, Va., Boliek said. There, the group opened for O.A.R. and Gomez.

Jimi Jive, on the other hand, has played very few shows outside of the group's hometown of Erie, or State College, where most of the band's members attend college, band members Sean Dolan and Paul Zielinski said.

The reason for Jimi Jive's reluctance to play outside of its homebase is simple.

"The band's just for fun. We all go to school. School comes first," Dolan, the group's bassist, said.

He added that if the members of the band were serious about making it big, playing music would be their career, and they never would have considered college.

But the members of Jimi Jive have always had more of a scholarly bent rather than a musical one.

"We were all physics nerds," Zielinski said of Jimi Jive's founding, which occurred when the band members started the group in high school. The original name of Jimi Jive was Jimi Jive and the Coefficiency of Friction.

"We weren't a real band. We just wanted a funny name," Zielinski said.

The group became Jimi Jive when the original band name was too long to fit on the original mp3 Web site.

"Our logo was the Greek letter mu," Zielinsky said. "There's a little bit of nerd rock in our history. We just started playing regular music after we grew up."